Affect has clear implications in marketing and it’s important to understand its role in human cognition. Chaudhuri seems to endorse Zajonc’s view which Chaudhuri characterizes as the view that affect precedes ratiocination. He then lists the following characteristics of affects: (a) they are primary, (b) they are basic, (c) they are inescapable, (d) they are irrevocable, (e) they implicate the self, (f) they are difficult to verbalize, (g) they may become separated from content and still remain. Chaudhuri states that the import of affective reactions are that nearly all of our experiences have an affective component. For instance, we do not just see ‘a sunset, but a “beautiful” sunset’ (p. 27).
Next Chaudhuri explicates his own list of important characteristics of emotion. They are that (1) emotions can never be wrong, (2) emotions are global, (3) emotions are fundamental, (4) emotions are fast, catchy, and memorable, (5) emotions are permanent, and (6) emotions are independent of rational cognition.
What Chaudhuri is likely getting at with (1)[4] is that persons can never be mistaken about their emotions. He is endorsing the infallibility of self-knowledge. Something like “[w]hen one carefully, attentively employs the mode of knowing unique to self-knowledge, one will not form a false belief about one’s own [mental] states” (Gertler). This is important because once an affect has been experienced, it seems more difficult to persuade someone that the affect was an inappropriate response than if they made some mistake in reasoning, i.e. lacked all the relevant evidence or made an error in the reasoning process. For instance, if an ad makes a consumer sad, he’s certainly not wrong that he’s feeling sad and convincing him he shouldn’t have been sad isn’t a straightforward task. After all that ad elicited that emotion in him; he didn’t make some judgment to feel sad about the content of the ad.
For claim (2)[5] Chaudhuri cites the Ekman and Friesen (1975) study that demonstrated six universal emotions. He also infers from Buck’s claim that emotions are nonsymbolic that emotional marketing can be culture neutral. For example, the Coca-Cola polar bears and the Nike swoosh are understood in the US and in Japan. It seems like Chaudhuri considers emotions to be global and reason not global in the following way: symbolic communication is culture dependent and nonsymbolic communication is culture neutral[6].
It’s not entirely clear what Chaudhuri means when he says, (3), emotions are fundamental. The literal interpretation is that emotions are a necessary part of any experience. However, he seems to be getting at something like emotions being an intuitive response that happens before ratiocination. That is, emotions obtain first and influence the reasoning about the experience we’ve had.
Chaudhuri’s characteristics of emotions (3), (4), (5), (6) share similar qualities. Emotions are fast, (4), and fundamental, (3). Emotions are catchy, memorable, (4), and permanent, (5). Emotions are permanent, (5), and can come apart from rational cognition, (6). Chaudhuri supports these characteristics with articles by Zajonc and others. According to (3), (4), (5), and (6) emotions are more favorable than rationality for a couple of reasons.
First, persuasion for, say, a product via reason can be overridden or undermined by reasons against using that product. For example, if a laundry detergent claimed that it cleaned clothes better because of some new chemical X and a competitor or news flash came out and said chemical X was bad for clothing then the reasons for the laundry detergent would be undermined. However, if the laundry detergent was preferred for some emotional reason, say a national hero endorsed the product, then even reasons against the product might not be sufficient to undermine the emotional appeal of using the product.
Another important reason is that the affect associated with the product can come apart from the reasons associated with the product. So, even after you’ve forgotten the benefits of buying organic you might still reach for the organic apples first because of the positive affect you’ve associated with buying organic products. Combined with the assertion that emotions are quicker to obtain and more memorable than reasons makes this a very powerful point for marketers.
- [4] Chaudhuri emphasizes that emotions are true, but it seems like he mistakenly takes this to be a consequence of Buck’s more plausible claim that emotions are non-propositional and thus cannot be false. That is, emotions have no truth value. But notice that if they have no truth value, then they can be neither false nor true. ↩
- [5] Of course he can’t mean simply that emotions are global in that all persons are capable of emotions since all persons are capable of reason as well and thus reason would be global in the same way that emotion is. Instead, Chaudhuri seems to mean that emotion is global in some distinct way and I take it that he means that certain emotions can be elicited using cultural-neutral communication. ↩
- [6] Although he doesn’t make it explicit, his view must be that only certain type of emotions are global in this way since he holds that “prosocial feelings are not independent of cognition” (p. 32). Thus the global emotions would be basic emotions such as love, pride, and pity (p. 31). Eliciting an emotion such as national pride will likely be different for, say, China as compared to the United States. ↩
- Chaudhuri, Arjun. (2006). Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
- Gertler, Brie, “Self-Knowledge”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/self-knowledge/>.
